As someone who ran the only other #ethnobotany programme in the UK (Aberdeen, which was closed more than 10 years ago), and who taught #ethnobiology at the Edinburgh Botanics for many years, I believe I am qualified to say that the closure of ethnobotany, ethnobiology, and anthropology at Kent is appalling cultural vandalism.
Dark times are upon us, and the custodians of the lineages of wisdom must be careful now.
I am very sad to have learned today of the untimely death of the artist Anna Laurent, due to cancer. I got to know Anna over the last year, as we were developing a PhD proposal together on the basis of this wonderful photography project she had done on seeds in #Iraq#Kurdistan . I would have loved to have worked with her on this #HistoricalEcology#Ethnobotany
I wanted to boost this to see if any ethnobotanists who know Ireland could help out. But the image is missing alt text.
"Screenshot of passage “Bonfire or Bone-Fire night .24th June. Fire lit. Ashes sprinkled in each field. Cattle driven three times round fire. Jumping over it. Bone put into it. A weed called moguard was put into it. Then this was brought home and put into thatch."
While I was trying to use Google Scholar and Internet Archive Scholar to see if they had anything, I ran across this paper. Just noting it down.
"Exploring the Irish National Folklore Ethnography Database (Dúchas) for Open Data Research on Traditional Medicine Use in Post-Famine Ireland: An Early Example of Citizen Science"
Half thinking of starting an #AcademicVenting hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.
Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail. #Universities#AcademicChatter#neoliberalism
#AcademicVenting there were hopes that the unique, important MA Ethnobotany could be saved by being transferred into Conservation, but apparently not. Just when the world needs more #Ethnobotany, not less.💔
The people who have created and run this wonderful programme are colleagues and friends.
[and if you want to respond with “well noone wants to study it ”; “you make more money in IT” - perhaps just don’t].
Just learned about #DecRecs! To make up for yesterday, Day 1 of Dec Recs I'll recommend this Chinese short animated series "All Saints Street" with four seasons. An angel, vampire, mummy, zombie, and werewolf live together. What could go wrong? Really enjoy it for the combination of great art, slice of life, and the supernatural. There's also a comic. It's produced similar to "Hey your cat ears are showing" but more memes and skulls than wholesome uwu. https://anilist.co/anime/114555#anime
For Day 10 of #DecRecs, three ethnobotany papers that I really enjoyed and found useful in defining my interests in decolonial herbalism. All are publicly accessible.
Muniz de Medeiros et al. 2012. The use of medicinal plants by migrant people: adaption, maintenance, and replacement.
Pieroni et al. 2020. Taming the pandemic? The importance of homemade plant-based foods and beverages as community responses to COVID-19.
Renowned Huachiperi/Matsigenka shaman Alberto Manqueriapa proudly shows off two cultivated varieties of hayapa (Brugmansia suaveolens), the unrivaled master plant in both Matsigenka and especially Huachiperi shamanism and herbal healing.
For more on this powerful plant see my post "The Path of Day and Night":
Stairway to heaven: the Matsigenka word for Bauhinia vine is "omoguititsa inkite", 'the umbilical cord of the sky'. In ancient times, this vine connected the earth to the celestial realm, but the connection was severed due to greed and aggression of earth-bound primordial beings against the star-people. In shamanic trance induced by master plants like ayahuasca and Brugmansia, the celestial connection is re-established. The Matsigenka people live in the upper Amazon region of southeastern Peru, the same region where Peter Matthieson traveled for his book The Cloud Forest.
Alright, let's see how many Plant Scientists/Botanists we can reach here in the Fediverse.
Reply to this tweet with an introduction of yourself, what first attracted you to plants, and what you work on now. And boost this toot! #Planticipation#Botany#PlantScience
@ml and what brought me to mushrooms was an eastern European girlfriend, of course! I tell the story in the special "Mushroom Issue" of Economic Botany published on the 50th anniversary of Valentina Pavlova and Gordon Wasson's ground breaking ethnomycological survey 'Russia, Mushrooms and History' who shared a similar mushroom honeymoon
#ClimateDiary My mother still sends me newspaper cutouts (❤️). Just opened this after returning from a long work trip this morning (perhaps more on this later):
“Can you even fly at all any more? “
i’ve intensely struggled with too much flying these last few weeks; to be honest it’s really thrown me, i feel i can’t say anything to anyone anymore. Not sure whether it will help but I look forward to reading this; and it’s so nice that my mother is trying to engage.
#ClimateDiary 2/n OK, so I flew to #Tanzania to attend a 5 day workshop on #IndigenousKnowledge (IEK) and #Ethnobotany at the University of #Dodoma. I thought a lot about going (because of flying) but also felt it’s important to forge new networks in the #TapestryOfAlternatives. I gave a talk about the need for IEK at this moment of #ClimateCrisis and #transition, and had conversations about all this throughout. There were brilliant young (and older) scholars from Tanzania, Kenya, DRC, Ethiopia
"What is missing for me in modern ethnobotany are the voices, the anecdotes, all the stuff which is discarded when making the final raw matrix to be deposited in a repository as a spreadsheet"
--From a new article by Łukasz Łuczaj on the future of #ethnobotany
In 1989, Terence Mckenna and I co-edited an edition of Whole Earth Review on the subject of plant teachers. Internet Archive now has downloadable full-text:
Sensory Ecology, Bioeconomy, and the Age of COVID: A Parallax View of Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge
"Drawing on original ethnobotanical and anthropological research among Indigenous peoples across the Amazon, we examine synergies and dissonances between Indigenous and Western scientific knowledge about the environment, resource use, and sustainability...